Almost immediately after anti-gun Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared that the city’s “weak link” in public safety is not enough gun control, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms accused him of clinging to “the stale and ineffective strategies of the gun prohibition lobby.”

Chicago’s handgun ban saw violent crime go up, and in 2010, that law was nullified when the US Supreme Court, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, extended Second Amendment protections to the states through 14th Amendment incorporation. That case was brought by CCRKBA’s sister organization, the Second Amendment Foundation.

The flap began when Emanuel told reporters that his answer to the city’s current bloodbath is to ban so-called assault weapons, which do not appear to be involved in many, if any, of the recent shootings and homicides.

He also asserted that “comprehensive background checks” would prevent violence, a notion that CCRKBA said in a press release is “so demonstrably untrue that it amounts to perpetuation of an urban myth.”

“If the city could round up every one of these shooters,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said, “they would find that none of them acquired their guns through legal channels, and thus were never subject to a background check, and Emanuel knows it. For him to suggest, much less believe, that his city’s crime problem would disappear by banning guns and expanding checks on law abiding citizens is at best delusional.”

Incredibly, one proposal put forth by Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, was to lock up criminals who commit crimes with firearms for a minimum of three years, and require that they serve at least 85% of their sentences.

That idea, Gottlieb said, is strikingly reminiscent of a plan championed by CCRKBA and other organizations nearly 20 years ago called “Hard Time for Armed Crime.” “That’s a strategy that was developed by the firearms community,” Gottlieb observed. “If (Mayor Emanuel) is going to steal our idea, he ought to at least give us credit.”

Gottlieb asserted that the Chicago mayor knows that his city’s problems “are with gangs, not guns.” He said the criminal element would continue ignoring Chicago gun regulations, same as they have in the past.

“We’re pretty sure Mayor Emanuel is trying to lay political groundwork to blame the state’s new concealed carry law, brought about by a successful gun rights lawsuit in federal court, if Chicago’s bloodbath continues,” Gottlieb contended. “He seems more interested in perpetuating the crime problem than eliminating it. Banning guns and blocking citizens from exercising their self-defense rights doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked and it’s a loser in court. Rahm should think out of the box or get out of town.”